César Fernández-Stoll

Versión hispana

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Happiness

If there are some who are concerned with the fact that many try to avoid paying taxes, even if within the law; there are others who do not want to pay taxes. How strange this might be?
Surpluses in government mean over-taxation while deficits mean over-expenditure.
Taxes on any society are meant to address specific budgetary needs for the service to the people. If the people is together and identified solidly with the issues the leaders of the social group have, being these elected or not; then the people will be happy with the use of their resources. Should some people be instead not fulfilled at all with the use being assigned to their resources, then these people will not be happy and they will express their unhappiness in many ways, from open, spontaneous demonstrations to simple increases in stress reflected by many illnesses natural consequence of upset lives and metabolisms or the worst of them all which is destruction of life in the name of accommodating preferred elites life styles.
Happier is the one who needs less than the one who has more.
The pursuing of happiness by the state can only be truthful and rightful as long as the reach is for each and everyone. Such a goal can become unattainable and unreachable as long as the prerogatives of the state in intruding over the life of families and individuals, increases. Hence the only possible way for any state to intervene in that achievable happiness for the people, is to stay as far away as possible from the natural institutions designed to find happiness and the freedom that give us the ability to take course and corrected as required; our own individuality and family through marriage between one man and one woman.
Human beings are social creatures because they have the virtue to love, God and their neighbors. To achieve common good and social justice, humans require of their freedom and to live in truth. Social justice can only be a goal when the vehicle is faith, hope and love.
Any system that promotes fear, despair and selfishness; only fosters unhappiness as the outcome of such a paradigm can only be lack of trust toward our neighbor and worst, against God Himself, thereby resulting in abandoning the individuality of the human person alongside his/her dignity and identity.
A culture of faith, hope and love is a culture of life and prosperity.
The typical quarrel of the twentieth century, as consequence of the azimuth reached by the age of reasoning and collectivism proposed by the different thinkers that made possible the disasters of the many revolutions, as well as the rise of the national socialism of the Nazi party in Germany, Fascism in Italy or communism in Russia or even the peaceful socialism of Sweden; that quarrel appears to be between socialism and capitalism. The former depicted as something of social acceptance and which transfers to the state many of the responsibilities people have as individuals while in the process surrendering the freedoms attached to those responsibilities to the elites that constitute the state served and fed by the people. On the other hand, capitalism is often depicted as a malign consequence of individuals thirst for money and with it for power.
The truth however is that the real struggle is between good and evil, between the human person as a creature of God, created to His image and likeness with dignity, individuality and identity where it is faith, hope and love what is in command, versus the reign of a chaotic thirst for self indulgence and self reward, of selfishness seeking power with the object of subjugating or subduing other humans in an unrestricted and convoluted morass of accidental and unrelated conditions with self control and reason only as instruments of culture disintegration.
The struggle between happiness and unhappiness is the struggle between good and evil, the struggle between Christianity and the inhumanity of collective thoughts.
Freedom is a gift from God and as such it depends or it is relative to Him as our creator and the omnipotent almighty and thereby depends on what God commands, what is God’s will. There is no such a thing as freedom as an absolute condition of humanity because freedom is dependent upon the truth and because of this can only be absolute and one, as the nature of God is of being the only living One and only almighty God.
Every one needs God, even the ones that deny Him, need of Him, because God is our creator and we all, like it or not, are related to Him. The secret of happiness is in the type of relationship we maintain with God. He loves us and is always and persistently seeking our love, our openness in our hearts.
When we look to have more we need more and we become dependent upon what we think to possess in this life, our freedom disappears diluted in the anxieties germinated from that thirst for more, that ambition, to the point of putting God behind us, away, inexistent. Our life style becomes our new god, the only meaningful issue in our lives and thereby, nothing and nobody can step in our way.
When we exercise self control and limit our needs to what our necessities of life are, we become closer to God and thereby happy, naturally happy. By needing less, we have more; we have what fulfills our soul not our body, not our flesh.
When we confuse the needs in our lives, wanting more for ourselves, we tend to forget others and the social tie that makes us part of that social engagement which is love, because we end up imposing upon ourselves a worship to our own self. Even when, after we reach that summit, we tend to make us an instrument of philanthropy we must carefully assess the reach and intention of our choices and deeds. Because happiness, particularly for us, will always be a component of love and love will be pain and sacrifice, as opposed to just giving so that I can receive.
Giving you receive, forgiving you are forgiven and dying you reach eternal life; says the prayer of Saint Francis, and that is intrinsic to love itself, give without expecting anything in return, because you will receive without expecting or asking for anything. When we expect to have a lot in order to start giving something, we are trying to be happy alone, ahead of everyone else, by ourselves. That fulfillment is only material and tangible only to our senses but not to our soul, because our soul becomes abstract to our neighbors.
Happiness is giving and forgiving because love is happiness because common good and social justice is love. Without love, happiness is unreachable because by trying to attain happiness outside love all it is achieve is an imaginary happiness relative to something excluding the purity in itself, something that could be how happiness is represented by inheritance of an immense fortune or by some types of material gain. The difference is the momentary sensation perceived versus the permanency of the state of the soul, satisfying the body versus fulfilling the soul.
Freedom is a gift that is there to give us happiness which can be threatened by our own desire to enslave our souls to the anxieties or desire to have more or to overindulge ourselves.